Bring the ground with you
A proposal is stronger when its maker can describe the conditions around it—not only the appealing outcome.
About the model
A shared practice for taking ideas seriously.
Value Backlog is designed for ideas that begin with real contact: something noticed, lived, studied, or practiced long enough to carry useful texture.
Read the principlesThe membership principle
Keep the first version small
A title, a question, or a partial observation can be enough. The list makes room for ideas before they are ready to perform.
Make room for other knowledge
Discussion is not a pitch room. Members add context, disagreement, experience, and useful questions.
Domain understanding
An idea becomes more useful when it stays close to the problem.
Domain understanding can come from lived experience, professional practice, care work, research, craft, or sustained attention. It does not require certainty. It does ask that an idea remain accountable to the people, systems, and constraints it touches.
The first question is not “Can this scale?” It is “What do we know about the ground beneath it?”
How ideas are considered
No scorecard. Just better questions.
Is the problem specific enough to be real?
We look for the situation behind the abstraction and the people affected by it.
What knowledge is already present?
We ask what is known firsthand, what needs to be learned, and whose perspective is missing.
What has been tried?
Past attempts, near misses, and existing work belong in the record. They help make the next step more honest.
What might be worth doing next?
An idea may remain a question, become a small public-good experiment, or earn the discipline of further work.
The aim is not more ideas.
It is a more faithful place to keep the ones worth returning to.
Open the private backlog